Older blog entries for hacker (starting at number 422)

SOLVED: Fixing Perl Plug-ins for XChat Azure in OS X Mavericks 10.9

I’m a heavy user of IRC and have been since the late 90′s. I use X-Chat for IRC on almost all machines, including Mac and Windows, not just the Linux environment that it was created upon. When I recently upgraded my OS X Lion (10.7.5) machine to OS X Mavericks (10.9), I started seeing a […]

Related posts:
  1. HOWTO: Configure XChat Azure on OS X to connect to Freenode using SASL + Tor With all the recent news about the NSA, Prism Surveillance...
  2. How Many Java Versions is Enough for Mavericks, Apple? A lot of software outright fails to work on Apple...
  3. SOLVED: Permanently setting “Hide Join/Part Messages” off in XChat I’ve been using XChat since early year 2000 (loooong time...

Syndicated 2013-11-05 21:50:37 from random neuron misfires

How Many Java Versions is Enough for Mavericks, Apple?

A lot of software outright fails to work on Apple OS X Mavericks. It’s a disaster. Almost nothing works right. Not only is the entire OS noticeably slower, by several orders of magnitude over the previous Lion (10.7.5) was running until a few days ago on my 11″ MacBook Air, but there are dozens and […]

Related posts:
  1. SOLVED: Java Plugin in Firefox on 64-bit Windows Server 2003 The corporate VPN software I use to get onto the...
  2. HOWTO: Download Oracle Java Releases from the Commandline The recent and critical Java CVE necessitates that everyone either...
  3. SOLVED: Install ALL Internet Explorer Versions on ONE Machine I’ve been fighting some “interesting” proxy issues inside my Windows...

Syndicated 2013-10-27 15:11:19 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: Remove annoying duplicate users in your WordPress blog

This happens quite a bit, and I’m surprised the default WordPress install doesn’t have this fixed, but here’s a fix for cleaning up the duplicate users that will end up in your _users table in WordPress. In my multi-site installation, that table is called ‘wpmu_users’. If you didn’t change the defaults for your site, it’s […]

Related posts:
  1. Putting an END to WordPress Trackback, Comment and Registration Spam I run quite a few WordPress blog sites for myself...
  2. Wide awake at 2:30am For some reason, I’m wide awake at 2:30am, after getting...
  3. Validating Blog Pingback Sites with Perl Over the last few months I’ve been wondering what the...

Syndicated 2013-10-11 01:14:57 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: Transparent icons on XFCE desktop

Another quick and dirty XFCE desktop hack, this one to add transparent icon backgrounds to your desktop icons. If you’re tired of looking at ugly icon label backgrounds, and really want transparent backgrounds, the fix is simple! Here’s the code: style "xfdesktop-icon-view" { ## opacity of text background (0 - 255, 0 = transparent) XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha […]

Related posts:
  1. HOWTO: Fix the broken “Open Terminal Here” menu icon in XFCE If you’re using XFCE, specifically version 4, you’ve probably seen...
  2. SOLVED: Missing Microsoft Office 2007 Shortcut Icons About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that my Windows application...
  3. Squid + Privoxy + Tor for secure, transparent web browsing With the advent of the new illegal monitoring going on...

Syndicated 2013-09-23 22:02:17 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Fix the broken “Open Terminal Here” menu icon in XFCE

If you’re using XFCE, specifically version 4, you’ve probably seen this issue come up a few times. It looks like this: The fix is pretty simple and straightforward. Here’s how: Go up to your “Applications Menu” and choose “File Manager”. This will launch your configured, default file manager (most-likely Thunar, unless you’ve changed something). Choose […]

Related posts:
  1. SOLVED: Missing Microsoft Office 2007 Shortcut Icons About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that my Windows application...
  2. Fixing a Broken Netflix I’ve been a long-time subscriber to Netflix. They would ship...
  3. This ISP Must Die, Palm Open Directory Syndicate, AvantGo Ok, I’m beyond frustrated now. I’ve sent my last two...

Syndicated 2013-09-23 21:37:31 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Create a Warrant Canary, or NSL Dead Man’s Switch

Thanks Slashdot for carrying your users over to my blog this morning! The rsync team has been doing this for quite awhile, and I had an idea. Why not share this more broadly? So I created a quick little script to generate my own “warrant canary”. Instructions follow below. Note: Based on the direct emails […]

Related posts:
  1. My friend Rex was shot dead More news about my friend Rex who was shot and...
  2. HOWTO create an Outlook rule to filter email you’ve been Bcc’d on Yes, you can create an Outlook rule to filter off...
  3. Plucker is not dead, new things are coming… 2007-09-27: Press Release: New Plucker website released with lots of...

Syndicated 2013-09-09 12:52:01 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Disable Usernames from Login Managers for Linux and Windows

With all the news flying around about security, the less we give a potential malicious attacker, the better. To that end, here’s how to disable the list of usernames or the last logged-in user on your machine(s) for Windows and Linux (gdm) when you boot them up and get to the login screen. Disable Usernames […]

Related posts:
  1. SOLVED: Sharing TweetDeck settings across multiple Windows and Linux machines I’ve been using TweetDeck for quite some time on Linux,...
  2. SOLVED: Fixing a Minor Nit with Office Communicator UPDATED to include Windows 7 information (see below) Like many...
  3. HOWTO: How to Fix a Forgotten Windows Administrator or User Password with Sticky Keys I pulled some of my very old Windows VMs out...

Syndicated 2013-09-08 00:35:08 from random neuron misfires

HOWTO: Properly install native VMware Tools in pfSense 2.0.3 (FreeBSD 8.1)

If you’re anything like me, you take security seriously. With all the recent news about the NSA and Prism and over-reach of surveillance, you’ll take this very seriously. I run several layers of nested firewalls, VPNs and other layers of security at my office. One of the things I run in a virtualized environment (VMware […]

Related posts:
  1. SOLVED: VMware Tools create_proc_entry Error with vmballoon_procfs_init on Linux Kernel 3.11.0 Another quick VMware Tools patch and fix if you’re using...
  2. FreeBSD Ports, a treasure trove of useful tools I’ve been configuring one of my machines as a FreeBSD...
  3. SOLVED: VMware Tools __devexit_p Error on Linux Kernel 3.8 and Earlier If you run a current version of VMware Workstation, VMware...

Syndicated 2013-08-24 22:49:04 from random neuron misfires

SOLVED: VMware Tools create_proc_entry Error with vmballoon_procfs_init on Linux Kernel 3.11.0

Another quick VMware Tools patch and fix if you’re using Linux Kernel 3.11.0 (and probably later, until this gets integrated into mainline). This time, if you’re seeing the following error: Using 2.6.x kernel build system. make: Entering directory `/tmp/modconfig-CZk9AS/vmmemctl-only' /usr/bin/make -C /lib/modules/3.11.0-999-generic/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. \ MODULEBUILDDIR= modules make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.11.0-999-generic' CC [M] /tmp/modconfig-CZk9AS/vmmemctl-only/backdoorGcc64.o CC […]

Related posts:
  1. SOLVED: VMware Tools __devexit_p Error on Linux Kernel 3.8 and Earlier If you run a current version of VMware Workstation, VMware...
  2. SOLVED: Building VMware Workstation modules on Linux 2.6.32 I use a lot of VMware Workstation here to manage...
  3. FIX: VMware VMW_HAVE_EPOLL error message with current distributions If you’ve tried installing VMware on a recent Linux distribution...

Syndicated 2013-08-23 19:11:22 from random neuron misfires

Using fdupes to Solve the Data Duplication Problem: I’ve got some dupes!

Well, 11.6 hours later after scanning the NAS with fdupes, I noticed that I’ve got some dupes across my system backups. # time ./fdupes -R -Sm "/nas/Backups/System Backups/" 2153352 duplicate files (in 717685 sets), occupying 102224.5 megabytes real 698m15.606s user 38m20.758s sys 92m17.217s That’s 2.1 million duplicate files occupying about 100GB of storage capacity in […]

Related posts:
  1. AT&T Locks Horns with Hurricane Sandy and my data-only MiFi We were hit pretty hard by Hurricane Sandy out here...
  2. SOLVED: How to put your NeatWorks data into Dropbox As I use Dropbox more and more, I’m beginning to...
  3. Removing thousands of duplicate email messages from your email I’ve been slowly loading all of my mail into GMail...

Syndicated 2013-08-23 16:05:16 from random neuron misfires

413 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!